IP Piracy? Not in my backyard!

We already touched upon the Creative Commons as a way to share content to varying degrees. Remember that the knife cuts both ways: you can borrow others' material but also, potentially, license your own. Learn more here about good practice, especially for podcasts and other multimedia.

Some copyright holders take steps to monitor distribution and use of their works. This could range from a digital watermark on an image or video file to a copy-protection scheme. Tampering with these is illegal, according to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). If someone violates your rights, you can issue a take-down notice. Patent Attorney Gene Quinn offers an accessible walk-through of the process on IPWatchdog.com, including the WHOIS lookup and a sample letter.

Thanks to a simple "vanity Google" – searching one's own name – I once caught a blatant text grab. A blogger had copied an investigative newspaper story off my website, from my byline to The Daily's copyright notice. A quick trawl through his site revealed little original content: he appeared to be a scraper, not a misguided fan. After the "author" ignored a takedown request, I wrote to his hoster, outlining the situation and asking for the post to be removed. Google wiped the whole blog.

To take action, you need to spot the violation. Teachers have long known about software for detecting plagiarism. Products like Turnitin, Eve2 and CopyCatch can also aid authors. Even an advanced Google search on a distinctive phrase can be productive.

A few other tactics:

1. Create a Google Alert for key terms.
2. Paste text from posts into Google's Blog Search.
3. Copyscape notices. These deter some scroungers, but you can also search for duplicates of your pages at this site.
4. MyFreeCopyright issues a badge with a unique code to embed on your blog. It stores a digital fingerprint of your original work, so you can prove ownership.
5. Services like Tynt can detail copy activity on your site – and even automatically add a link back to your blog with every paste.
6. Forbid right-click captures with this code inside body tags.
7. Email entries to yourself, establishing a "paper" trail that demonstrates authorship and date published. In Blogger, the drill is Settings>Email>Blogsend Address. Most folks prefer to use a free web-based account dedicated solely to this purpose.
   
   This also is handy to back up your entries. Recently, in an epic cut-and-paste flail, I managed to overwrite a file on Blogger and my home computer. Luckily Google's cache contained a five-day-old snapshot of the site, so I managed to restore the post (whether it should be is another question: I wasn't happy with that text...).
   
   Conduct a standard search, but rather than clicking the headline, click on the grey "cache" link beside the green URL. Then go to View>Page Source on your browser and grab the relevant text. The Wayback Machine is another digital time capsule handy in such moments.
   
8. Post a copyright notice, although one is no longer required for legal protection of original content. (Those of you who live in America may recall the ubiquitous loop of It's a Wonderful Life screening from 1974–1993, seemingly nonstop? That's thanks to old laws, which required re-application 28 years after a film's release. Republic Pictures finally seized control again, arguing the movie was a derivative work of a short story, for which it owned adaptation rights. Life's much easier now for creative types, especially since we don't have to watch Jimmy Stewart blubbing endlessly...)
   
   A copyright notice can deter would-be plagiarists, by signalling that you care enough to take preventative measures and thus are more likely to pursue DCMA takedown options and legal action. Much like a bicycle lock, notices stop opportunistic thieves (anyone truly determined will take your Schwinn or your story regardless. But a little effort can ward off impulse-grabbers...).
   
   Most bloggers feature copyright notices in a footer, the area at the bottom of a web page. Other common items there include links to privacy policies, contact information, and sometimes addition navigation links. To add a copyright notice to your blog's footer:

• From the Dashboard, click Layout followed by the "Add a Gadget" link in the blog footer area. (screenshot)
• Select the Text gadget. (screenshot)
• Click "Edit HTML" to switch to HTML edit mode. (screenshot)
• Leave the Title field blank. Enter the following text into the content field. (screenshot)

• <p style="text-align: center;">All content &copy;2009 Mike Keran.  All rights reserved.</p>

• (Don't forget to change Mike's to yours!)
• Click Save in the Configure Text dialog. Click Preview to double check how the new footer looks, then click Save to finalize the changes to your blog's layout.
• The Copyright Office's website details more exact wording.